Cinema and Television: The Blending of Two Mediums

Abstract

Since cinema’s inception, critics have asked a question, without fail, each time a new era or innovation was brought to the artform. Is cinema dead? The introduction of sound in films, or even color. The beginning of the digital era, with digital cameras starting to replace film cameras, or even more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic and its effect on movie theaters, with films going more and more to streaming services. I’m here to answer it, once and for all. Cinema is not dead, but it has evolved into a new medium. Maybe the title “cinema” has become less and less applicable. The label “Cinema” is dead. However what Cinema represents, is not. Cinema has become television, and television has become cinema. When television first boomed in American households post WWII, programs were much less about narrative, and more about quick, witty, short form productions that would catch your attention as you folded laundry, or smoked your after dinner cigarette. Never were there feature film length productions with budgets surpassing those of the films themselves. There was no Game of Thrones (2011-2019), no Breaking Bad (2008-2013), no Sopranos (1999-2007). These programs require the viewer not only to tune in with their full attention in order to not miss something important in the plot’s development each week, but they also ask years of their viewers. Near decades. One stark difference between cinema and television was the way that folks interacted with the mediums. Cinema kidnapped you, it asked you for a night out, it even turned the lights out. It needed your undivided attention. As time unfolded, Television began to do the same. And yet, the opposite has happened too. Cinema now releases on your favorite streaming services right alongside its twenty different spinoff shows, or whatever number streaming services can produce before milking their precious intellectual property dry. For this comparison between the two to be made however, we must first attempt to define cinema, as well as its newly indiscernible twin, television.